Richard North, 23/01/2014 1658
Compared with the flood of online comment when a certain political party is
mentioned, the responses to newspaper reports on the latest EU climate
change and energy package have been remarkably thin.
Most of the legacy media comment has focused on the headline news that the
Commission has abandoned binding renewables targets, something picked up by
the Mail, the Telegraph and the BBC. Even the revered Watts up with that
has been gulled by the headlines, as indeed has been the New York Times.
The Independent however, breaks the mould, arguing that Renewable energy
targets are bad policy.
The trouble with EU communications though is that, even when they are
written in English, and thus use English words, the language isn’t actually
English. Words like “binding” which mean certain things to you and me don’t
necessarily mean the same thing to the Commission. If someone really wanted
to make a fortune, they would devise a version of Google translate which
was capable of turning Commission-speak into ordinary language.
This, however, may prove impossible. A word can not only mean something
completely different from its ordinary usage, the same word can mean
different things according to context, and even the time of day – and
certainly when it occurs in the Commission life-cycle. The proximity of
treaty negotiations also affects meaning.
Here, one has to recall that we are at the end of the life of this
Commission. It effectively goes on hold in May, with the European
Parliament elections and will not start work anew until November. Then, the
new Commission is appointed, with a brand new president. Then, most
probably, we will be seeing (or shortly thereafter) an announcement of a
treaty convention, starting the following year.
With these factors in minds, one needs to ignore the legacy media
renditions of the Commission press release. Strangely, the telling detail
is there, but the document (of the many produced) which probably has the
most significance is the COM final.
This is a type of document which few journalists ever read and even fewer
would understand if they did. In this case, we are confronted with
something of relatively modest length – a mere 18 pages. But what it gains
in brevity, it – like the press release which summarises it – makes up
for in obscurity. It is written in the very best of Kremlin-esque
traditions, where the real meaning is hiding in plain sight.
The crucial part of the COM is right at the very end, under the heading,
“next steps”. There, we see the “Commission’s view”, of the key elements of
a new 2030 climate and energy framework. It should comprise, the Commission
says, “a Greenhouse gas reduction target at EU level which is shared
equitably among the Member States in the form of binding national targets;
a reform of the Emissions Trading System” and “an EU level target for the
share of renewable energy”.
All that is headline stuff, and it tells you very little indeed, because
the real meat of the whole COM is tucked in at the end of the sentence,
where the Commission confides that it wants, “a new European governance
process for energy and climate policies based on Member State plans for
competitive, secure and sustainable energy”.
Then we are told, “Energy efficiency will continue to play a significant
role in delivering the Union’s climate and energy objectives and this will
be the subject of a review to be concluded later in 2014”.
Reading on, we see that the Commission is inviting the Council and the
European Parliament to agree by the end of 2014, that the EU should pledge
a greenhouse gas emissions reduction of 40 percent by early 2015 as part of
the negotiations which conclude in Paris in December 2015. Then we get the
view that the “Union should also be prepared to contribute positively to
the summit hosted by the UN Secretary General in September 2014”.
For this, the Commission also “invites the Council and the European
Parliament to endorse an EU level target of at least 27 percent as the
share of renewable energy to be consumed in the EU by 2030 to be delivered
through clear commitments decided by the Member States themselves,
supported by strengthened EU level delivery mechanisms and indicators”.
With that now in the bag, we see not so much another chunk of meat, but a
wholesale joint, enough to feed the multitude.
The Commission, it declares blandly, “also invites the Council and the
European Parliament to endorse the Commission’s approach to future climate
and energy policies and its proposal to establish a simplified but
effective governance system for the delivery of climate and energy objectives”.
The magic words in all this are “a new European governance process for
energy and climate policies” and a “simplified but effective governance
system”. This is code for “treaty change” and a new, all-singing,
all-dancing climate and energy policy. Thus, all we have here is an
end-of-term prospectus from a soon to be departed Commission, and a marker
for new powers when it comes to the treaty negotiations which cannot now be
very far ahead.
The rest is simply a holding statement. Nothing changes in the immediate
future and, by the time we reach 2030, a new treaty will have been on-place
and fully working for more than a decade, delivering that which the
Commission is presently unable to enforce.
By then, “binding” really will mean binding. Commission-speak and the
English language will have merged.
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